Wednesday, September 05, 2007

(By Chris Moore, LibertarianToday.com) -- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently bragged of being “a master in calculation and tabulation” whose “double proof” formulas showed the US wouldn’t wage war on Iran, may want to recheck his figures and compare them with Pat Buchanan’s assessment of the chances for such an attack.

On MSNBC on Monday, August 27, and in his follow up columns of August 28 and September 1, Pat Buchanan hit the nail on the head in identifying the powerful forces pushing for a US war against Iran, a war that Buchanan believes might be met (at least initially) with public approval.

As Buchanan noted on MSNBC: “I think if you took polls of the American people, they would put Iran right up at the top of America's enemies list.”

The recent US public paranoia over Iran, of course, isn’t based on reality, but rather on the latest neocon mediacampaign claiming anti-US machinations by Iran in Iraq, and portraying Iran’s ongoing nuclear power program as an imminent WMD “threat.” The propaganda has effectively allowed the Bush administration to scapegoat Iran for America’s self-inflicted Middle East wounds, and portray Iran as on the cusp of developing renegade nuclear weapons, which is a lie.

Buchanan continues: “So I think in the Democratic Party, of course, you've got the -- with due respect, you've got the Israeli Lobby and Israel, and you've got the hardline like [Sen. Joe] Lieberman, and you've got the Neoconservatives, and you've got a lot of evangelical Christians and others who think this is a real menace and you ought to hit them.”

On the other side of the aisle, Buchanan says, you’ve got a GOP hierarchy heavily influenced by “evangelical Christians” and providing it cover for war. What Buchanan really means is, not all evangelicals, but rather fanatical Christian Zionistdispensationalists, who make up only a percentage of evangelicals, but who are as committed to putting Israeli interests ahead of American interests as are the Jewish ethnic nationalists in the Democratic Party, but for different political, cultural and theological reasons.

In his follow upcolumns, Buchanan continues to drive all these points home: ‘Who is pushing for attacks on Iran? Israel and its lobby. Vice President Cheney. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who has been calling for air strikes on al-Quds camps for months. And a War Party facing lasting disgrace for having lied the country into an unnecessary war, and for having assured the American people it would be a "cakewalk."'

In its rush to ape the GOP, Buchanan says, the Democratic Congress has basically destroyed its own ratings on the war issue--and this just months after it was swept into power on a huge American backlash against Bush’s incompetent management of the Iraq war:

“Incredibly, only 3 percent of the nation gives Congress a positive rating on its handling of the war,” Buchanan notes.

Why didn’t the Democrats simply continue to ride the anti-war tidal wave all the way to another big victory over the wounded, discredited GOP? Again, due to the Jewish nationalist influence over party leadership:

“Last spring, Nancy Pelosi herself, after a call from the Israeli lobby, pulled an amendment that would have forced Bush to come to Congress for specific authorization before attacking Iran,” writes Buchanan. “Before the August recess, the Senate voted 97 to zero for a resolution sponsored by Joe Lieberman to censure Iran for complicity in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.”

As blogger Arthur Silber observed, this vote has put the Democrats on record as supporting “an amendment that accuses Iran of committing acts of war against the United States. Thus, if we were to attack Iran, we would purportedly only be acting defensively, and in response to what Iran has already done. This amendment, based entirely on unproven, propagandistic, intentionally warmongering allegations, was pushed in large part by Lieberman. Democrats (and progressive bloggers) may condemn the former Democrat all they wish: the fact remains that every Democratic Senator who voted on this measure voted for it. When the wider war begins, they will have no serious basis on which to object.”

So what were the Democrats supposed to do, ask party partisans, cede the national security issue to the GOP by opposing the Lieberman’s censure?

Well, going back to the amendment that could have been used to stop a Bush attack on Iran that was killed by Nancy Pelsoi at the behest of AIPAC, (and from a sane, war-opposed perspective inline with the overwhelming majority of educated Americans), the Democrats could have done the following:

1) Passed the amendment forcing Bush to come to Congress for permission to wage war against Iran.

2) If such a request came, put forward a full throttle campaign portraying it as yet more GOP warmongering destined to compound America’s problems in the Middle East, consistent with the GOP’s last wrongheaded and misleading initiative against Iraq. Such a campaign would have properly educated the public about the minimal threat posed by Iran.

3) Rejected the request with the overwhelming support from the American people, which would have forced Bush to back down and limp from office in disgrace, thus solidifying the anti-war voting block going into the 2008 elections.

The Democratic leadership didn’t want to allow their members to force Bush to obtain permission to attack Iran because they knew it would put them on record if and when the request came from Bush. Such a vote could have been painfully divisive to the party (in the same way their vote last May granting Bush the $120 billion Iraq war spending package with no strings attached has proven a problem ever since). Likely to pass, any Iran war vote would have demonstrated to the American public once and for all that the majority of Democrats are as complicit in America’s Middle East disasters as are the Republicans.

And if the American public realized that the Democrats were equally culpable, how could the party win the presidency by pulling off yet anotherbait and switchscam running as a force for “change” as it did in the 2006 elections? Simply put, it couldn’t. And so Pelosi killed the amendment vote altogether.

Democratic strategists thought the no-vote policy would accomplish two goals at once: an official position of ambiguity on Iran that, cynically, would allow the party to maintain at least some support from its huge war-opposed rank and file; and at the same time, advance the Israel lobby’s goal of a war with Iran (which is clearly the Bush administration default policy) by giving Bush a free hand to bomb without a any possible hitches--which is what originally motivated AIPAC to demand the amendment’s removal.

Of course, the Democrats didn’t count on the treacherousJoe Lieberman’s censure resolution, which forced them take a position anyway. And as a result, it has been all downhill for them since.

As Pat Buchan noted, when it comes to war, the Democratic Congress “has lost the hawks, and the owls, and the doves. No one trusts its leadership on the war.”

Indeed, few trust the Democrats now on anything at all; a recent Gallup poll found 55% of Americans disapprove of the way Democrats in Congress are handling their overall job. And why should they be trusted? They have tried to manipulate and massage nearly everyone, and as a result, have ended up with the support of no one.

Their collapse is almost epic, but a Logic 101 student could have predicted such an outcome.

The 10 - 20% of Americans who are fanatical hawks are of course always going to back the GOP, which has proven time and again it will happily wage perpetual war against “Islamofascism” on behalf of Israel with no qualms whatsoever. But the owls (wise independents and realists) have been backing away from Washington’s Middle East adventures for months now, and or today in full retreat; and the doves have been loudly opposed to U.S. Middle East interventionism for years.

So why didn’t the Democrast simply side with the owls and the doves and ride the anti-war tidal wave to yet another overwhelming election victory in 2008? Because in their greedy grab for power, they tried to have it all ways: as the "strong on defense" (read war) party, and as the party of peace; as the pro-Israel party, but also the party of responsible Middle East policy.

The Democrats are also making terrible decisions because they are listening to the neocons’ secret weapon, the Democratic Jewish nationalist Zionists, who are so warped by their Israeli loyalties that they can no longer determine what is and is not in the Democratic Party’s best domestic political interests. And of course, the bitterJoe Lieberman, who still caucuses with the Democrats, is ever eager to repayin kind the party that rejected him in his 2006 primary and forced him to run as an independent.

What all this really boils down to is that the Democrats are a venal party of cynics, knaves, and fools, because they have no principles other than the quest for power, and because in that quest, they take counsel from groups that put Israeli interests ahead of American ones. The GOP can get away with such behavior because its large Judeo-Christian Zionist base has no problem subordinating what it views as an increasingly decadent and pagan America’s interests to those of the Judeo state of Israel. But with a large secular base opposed religious wars, such a strategy could never have succeed for the Democrats.

Of course, the delusional, scheming Democratic leadership apparently thought it could--so long as war with Iran was staved off until Hillary Clinton and a large Democratic Congressional majority were safely in office. But while successfully pounding away at the GOP on the issue of Iraq, the Democratic Party was back-stabbed by Joe Lieberman on behalf of the Right side of the Zionist-axis, which has now successfully moved the goalposts. The Democrats have been forced to buck up the battered and teetering GOP by siding with it on a contrived issue designed to demonize Iran in the form of a censure that was worded by Lieberman so as to be virtually fail proof .

Why were the Dems so easily played for fools? Perhaps they earnestly thought they could trust the historically Democrat-partisan Israel lobby to wait until 2009 for an Iranian war. But clearly, the Jewish Zionist coalition, which now includes many Republicans, wasn’t convinced that a future Congress, one that will likely be elected amidst an unpopular Iraq war, would be sufficiently hawkish to back a campaign against the Iranians--even one orchestrated by a president Hillary.

And so the U.S. is left once more with two parties at the helm in Washington DC hopelessly removed from the best interests of the people they purport to represent, and both yet again putting the country on the path to a destructive and unnecessary war.

Really, how much longer can a “democracy” with an unrepresented majority possibly continue to survive, let alone function?